Johnny Gage: Just Lean Back
by Do the Gabriel
Summary: This is a short story, and it is not to be taken seriously. When Johnny is mentally handicapped and "living in a hallucination", you will see his sad story the way he saw it. WARNING: Contains character death.


Johnny Gage: Just Lean Back

Johnny Gage went insane a long time ago. Everyone knew about it. They read the stories in the paper, or heard it at the funeral last year, or could tell what had happened by the sad, distant look in Roy's eyes, or the eyes of his children.

Everyone knew that it was a tragedy, one that could have and should have been avoided. Johnny was in the hospital for twenty weeks. He was crazy. "How sad," people thought, "He was sure one great paramedic." People know that it all started when station fifty-one was called to a water rescue. Apparently, Johnny was under too long. After a while you get brain damage, you know.

People know a lot about the incident. But what they don't know is what it was like for Johnny himself….

….

Johnny leaned back as far as he could in his strait jacket and wiped under his nose furiously to stop the tears from dripping down his face.

He was already soaked to the skin; what freaky idiot would add to that?

Johnny, apparently. Despite his excessive effort, the tears came crashing down fast enough to compete with a waterfall. Tears falling this hard were quite painful, and could result in face disfiguration, indigestion, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and even death. The poor man had no self-control. He let out a little cat mew, sounding pathetic, and then he snorted to discharge the snot from his hairy nostrils.

He had to think of a way to distract himself. So he picked up the largest rock he could find and began to write in the sand….

**This Is What Happened:**

_As I strolled innocently down the street towards my tenth-floor apartment (though obviously I was quite distracted, having recently picked up a new wrench) a man of about six feet of tall and five feet of fat came up to me and asked, in an overly cheery voice, if he could borrow a ten-dollar bill. I said no. This made him angry, and this strangely wide man expressed this by falling to the ground and pounding the earth, screaming "Hallelujah!"_

_I attempted to defuse the situation. "Sir?" I inquired, gently prodding his damp, beefy shoulder with my big toe. "I am a certified paramedic. Can I help you?"_

_The "man" then pounded the ground thrice and stood up as quick as the wind, taking deep, filling breaths and cackling. "So you think I am a sir?!" He, or, rather, she, then ripped off her exquisitely crafted face mask and revealed all the feminine features and long hair typical of a female. She looked to be about twenty years old, which disturbed me, because the mask had made her look like a fifty-year-old man. She was still just as fat, though, which led me to think that possibly she was wearing a fat suit? She had a slim chin._

_However, that is beside the point. The point is that I was scared out of my wits because this man was coming up to me and singing hallelujah, and then ripping some facial covering to reveal that she was a full-grown woman. This sort of thing doesn't happen everyday (I should hope). Shaking and shivering, I suddenly pieced it together—this was a setup. The mafia had sent an outsider to distract me while they robbed my apartment!_

_I was such an idiot._

_Anyway, after I made my brilliant deduction, I got the brilliant idea to accuse this deranged woman of attempted deception and to start running to the nearest phone booth to call the police. And then, she grabbed me. And then she pulled out this bottle of water and an army knife and_

_Whoops, better wipe this all away. Here she come. With her mafiaesk friends._

_I think I am in love with her._

Johnny endured being beat up by the mafia, then he wrote a poem in the sand. A poem inspired by that beautiful, obese woman.

**Ice Skating**

_You make my head spin_

_My thoughts are like a spiral of smoke, gliding towards the stars_

_I must be living in a hallucination_

_But I don't think so_

_Because, Mary, you are so real to me_

_You are real_

_Mary, I am ice skating_

_On the edge of basic insanity_

_I am head over heels for you_

_I would do anything for you_

_Mary, please come ice skating with me_

_So we can jump into the ice together_

_And we can just lean back and relax._

**TWENTY YEARS LATER**

Johnny lay down on his blanket and knew he was not long for this world: he was starving to death.

Johnny did not want to die so slowly. Johnny didn't even want to die, really, but especially not slowly.

Johnny sat up and rubbed his arms. It was so cold. He looked at the poem he'd written in the sand.

**Love Letters in the Sand**

_The sea tears at the beach, at the people, at the birds, at the sky_

_The sea tugged at your heart, Mary_

_And while I tugged at my shoelace, to pull it tight,_

_You were tugging at your purse's drawstring and packing up_

_And while I stared out to the horizon_

_You were walking to my car_

_You stole my car and drove away_

_You drove away, Mary_

_In MY car_

_You always were the brave one_

_And as I walked home that night, with my head in my hands_

_And my heart in your hands_

_You were sailing the sea_

_In my sailboat_

_And now you're dead, Mary_

_You are dead in my brain_

_Because you never existed, Mary_

_I have been in this strait jacket for twenty years_

_I am an old person_

_And now I am a widower, too_

It was a good poem. It made him proud.

Johnny leaned back into the sand then, accidentally, and suffocated.

THE END


End file.
